The William Roberts Society

William Roberts Society News

[Last revised 7 January 2012]

From past newsletters

WR at auction

WR in the Tate archive

The artist's models

A 'new' portrait by WR

WR works to go to the Tate

Richard Cork on William Roberts

Pollies and primates at Birmingham

'William Roberts: England at Play' at Chichester

Publication of John Roberts's Poems for Sarah

The sale of William Roberts's house and its contents

William Roberts as portraitist

Major donation for a publishing fund

Charitable-trust status

The Happy Family at Bournemouth

James Malpas lecture at the National Portrait Gallery

The William Roberts Society Fitzrovia walk

William Roberts and the USA

The William Roberts Society archives

New exhibitions featuring William Roberts

A Roberts display at Tate Britain

In May 2012 a display of works by William Roberts will open at Tate Britain. As well as works from the estate of John Roberts which were accepted by H.M. Government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to the Tate in 2007 (see WR works to go to the Tate), the exhibition will also include earlier Tate acquisitions.

It will begin with early work including Slade-period figure compositions, followed by Vorticist subjects including works reproduced in Blast. The most substantial part of the display will focus on the 1920s, where the Tate's holdings are strongest, and will be arranged thematically, showing paintings of urban life and religious subjects – such as The Cinema (1920), The Port of London (c.1922), and Deposition from the Cross (c.1926) – alongside compositional drawings exploring similar subjects.

The final section will focus on later work from the 1940s to the 1970s, and will include a section on Roberts's art-world satires and pamphlets, including his engagement with Vorticist history in the 1950s, when his polemical pamphlets challenged Wyndham Lewis's version of events.

The exhibition will run from 21 May 2012 to 10 March 2013, and is likely to contain about two dozen works. Admission will be free.

Athletes Exercising in a Gymnasium (aka Gymnasts), 1920 – one of the works to be included in the Tate display
© The Estate of John David Roberts

WR at auction

At Sotheby's sale of modern and post-war British art on 15–16 November, WR's Bath-night – a watercolour and gouache study for The Wash 1929 – sold for £19,375, a pencil study for The Judgement of Paris 1933 for £18,750, the oil of The Barber's Shop, c.1946, for £127,250, and The Boxing Match, c.1925–7?, for £217,250.

Bath-night – study for The Wash, 1929
© The Estate of John David Roberts

The Judgement of Paris, 1933
© The Estate of John David Roberts

The Barber's Shop, c.1946
© The Estate of John David Roberts

The Boxing Match, c.1925–7?
© The Estate of John David Roberts

At Christie's South Kensington on 25 October a pencil Portrait of a Man Wearing a Monocle sold for £2,125. We believe the picture dates from c.1935, and that the sitter is Major E. O. Kay, a collector who in 1943 commissioned Stanley Spencer to paint his portrait.

Major E. O. Kay (aka Portrait of a Man Wearing a Monocle), c.1935
© The Estate of John David Roberts

The auction record for a work by William Roberts doubled when his painting The Masks (c.1932) sold for £457,250 in the first part of Sotheby's sale of the Evill/Frost collection on 15–16 June. Two years ago a record was set when Brass Balls (1922) was auctioned for $368,000 (then about £228,000) in Israel – a price which was also exceeded by two other works in the Evill/Frost sale: The Restaurant (£373,250) and Dogs of the Beni Hillal (£409,250).

The other works by Roberts in the sale all exceeded their upper estimates – sometimes by several hundred per cent. Newpapers (1926) sold for £169,250, Windy Day (1941) for £121,250, The Judgement of Paris (1933) for £109,250, Spanish Rhythm (1937) for £91,250, Summer Night (c.1956–7) for £44,450, Artist and Wife (1940) for £34,850, Woman Bathing Child (1939) for £30,000, The Self-portrait (1947) for £18,125 and The Recorder Player (1935–6) for £10,625.

The Masks, c.1932
© The Estate of John David Roberts

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Collection of WR images, and requests for others

David Cleall is in the process of updating his listings of Roberts's works. He now has nearly one thousand recorded images, and his collection of reproductions has been boosted by Ruth Artmonsky giving him her own considerable collection of copies. David has now accumulated probably six or seven hundred reproductions of WR's work – surely the most comprehensive collection anywhere. He has been most generous in sharing his work with others, and Andrew Heard, who organised the acclaimed Roberts retrospective in 2004, and Andrew Gibbon Williams have acknowledged their debt and gratitude to him.

David would be very grateful if he could be notified of any reproductions of rare Roberts work via

A picture that David would be particularly interested in acquiring a reproduction of is The Bowling Alley (1927–8).